Symptoms: when running defrag (the 209KB WINME version) on my drive d: it starts to move the first 10 or 12 clusters, turning them from light blue to white (white meaning empty, as they are being moved), then halts and gives the "cannot defragment because you have to run scandisk first...) message. What I have done: ran scandisk (no errors) ran scandisk thorough (no errors) ran hitachi hard drive utility, in both quick and in advanced mode (no errors) moved all data to c: drive and reformatted d: (defrag then worked since d: was empty, but put files on it and symptom returns) tried different sets of files on d: (to see if a corrupted file was the problem - this did not change symtoms either) removed the d: partition altogether, then re-created it, reformatted using "format /u /c". symptom did not change then finally I tried defragging using the win95 (234KB) version and it worked! So I went back to the winme defrag and played with the settings. Here is the conclusion unselecting "rearrange program files so my programs start faster" results in defrag working properly. Selecting it, causes the error message. It has never given me a problem before. Just thought I'd share this.

I am forced to conclude that you have hit some "vary rare" condition where WinME defrag does not work properly on W98SE, which is a new one on me. It seems very odd because so many of us are doing this fine (you too previously I see). I have W98SE and have "rearrange program files...." checked. It works just fine. Derek.W

I've never run into that problem either. But thanks for posting both the problem and its cause.

What you may have bumped into is corruption in the \APPLOG files. Try deleting all of them, and try the Optimize Programs again.